Monday – Bootstrapathon Precrusor

On Monday, April 27th at 6:00pm-7:00pm in 380 Soda Hall we will have Vivek Sodera, Co-founder of Rapleaf talk about his experiences of bootstrapping a startup from college – as a precursor to Bootstrapathon on Tuesday. 

Tuesday – Bootstrapathon

The event will take place on Tuesday, April 28th at 6:30pm-8:30pm in HP Auditorium. This event is being co-hosted by the Berkeley Business Plan Competition, Computer Science Undergraduate Association, Eta Kappa Nu (Electrical Engineering Honor Society), Global Social Venture Competition, Haas Entrepreneurship Association, Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Plug and Play Technology Center and Startups at Berkeley (ST@B). Space is limited, please sign up here: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB2293XQ4P2ZY

If you are interested in pitching your idea to the audience on Tuesday, please email Dave Bend (dave_bend@mba.berkeley.edu).

The Agenda for Tuesday

6:30-6:45 — Pizza!

6:45-7:00 — Five minute blurbs from Plug and Play as well as Pillsbury Winthrop (Introductions by Dave Charron)

7:00-7:15 — Danae Ringelmann discusses her experience launching IndieGoGo (Introduction by Dave Charron)

7:15-7:30 — Pitches by entrepreneurs to the audience (timekeeping by Dave Bend)

7:30-8:30 — Networking

See you there!

So, last Thursday, April 2nd, along with Berkeley’s IEEE we got a group of 17 people with varied entrepreneurial experiences (some who had successfully started and sold several startups and others who are considering starting one, with many in between), closed the door, and had them just talk for two hours about ‘Entrepreneurship in Consumer Web Technology’. Some brief descriptions of what we talked about – you’ll have to check out the full video to get the complete scoop (Note: if you do watch the video, please skip the first 20 minutes as we’re just chatting and munching on delicious West Coast Pizza):

• Ad models – Are they substainable? Finding the right demographic and hypertargeting. Gaining critical mass.
• Other Business models on the web – Other Business/Revenue models on the web. Building “products not business models”.
• Picking a team - Choosing team-members you can trust and respect. What’s the right combination of engineers and business people? When should you hire the MBAs; are they even necessary?
• Financing – When do you bootstrap? When do you go to VC’s? 
• Launching web apps- When should you launch – earlier or later?
• Competitive Advantage – How do you take on a large player in the market (the Google’s and Microsoft’s of the world)? How do you reach a global audience?

It was a lot of fun seeing people’s views on these topics, and we thought it went well enough to do it again! We’re planning similar discussion events on renewable energy, biotechnology, cloud computing, and other fields. Tell us if you interested in a particular one, or would like to see another discussion event. We’re going to have more people involved next time, and we also want to get more grad students and people from academia.

You can also follow them on Twitter for live updates.

Date: Thursday, March 12, 2009
Time: 7:30pm – 10:00pm
Location: Blakes on Telegraph
Street: 2367 Telegraph Ave
City/Town: Berkeley, CA

RSVP at the Facebook event and check out past events here.

It was also a tremendous success.

The combined efforts of IEEE, UPE, the CSUA and ST@B this year brought in record attendance – more than double last year’s finishing entrants.

Our judging panel was par none. I watched in mixed horror and admiration as students defended their design choices against the constructive interrogation of Professor Brian Harvey and the representatives from Y-Combinator, Kinfo, Palantir, and Facebook.

But more important, perhaps, was the personal experience of being a participant.

Me, post 5 RedBulls and 7 Mountain Dews.

I am not actually a terribly experienced programmer, and this was the first time I tried to pit my nascent abilities against the challenge of creating something completely novel, original, and mine. I’ll admit it here – my project never worked.

What did work was the instigation to try, and the fact that even my failure gave me enough experience that I’m going to get this 3-dimensional computer vision control problem working if it kills me. The camaraderie wasn’t bad either. Struggling with everything you have while simultaneously fighting off 36 hours sans sleep is an experience that can’t be compared. It brings you closer to your teammates. Makes you laugh at very silly things. Sometimes mildly hallucinate…

Finally, and of greatest impact I think, was seeing some of the pretty tremendous achievements Cal students are capable of. Whether it was the winning web-based remote application toolkit, 3D news visualization, or the whimsical defense-of-stack in missile command – the intelligence and possibility crammed into one room was palpable. I have to say it was a pretty great feeling to be associated, even loosely, with the creative process taking place.

1st Place- The Hiro Protagonist
Chase Shimmin, Jacob Howard

Chase and Jacob described their project as “an application framework that allows GUI applications to be rendered and interacted with from both a user’s desktop environment as well as via a web server, where they applications are rendered using XHTML/CSS/JavaScript. The application state is managed by an application server, which interacts with the local application interface through widgets and with the web-based interface through AJAX callbacks.” Very impressive work in only 18 hours.

2nd Place- News Kaiser
Yiding Jia, Jeremy Cowles

Yiding and Jeremey described their project as a 3D news vizualization program.

3rd Place- Kaplan Killers
Upinder Malhi, Edward Lin

Upinder and Edward built a simple yet useful SAT helper. Their firefox extension highlights SAT words and shows the user a dashboard of words learned.

Honorable Mention- Ani Mani
Anhang Zhu, Muller Zhang, Jeff Yan, Avik Das

Team Ani Mani built an Adobe Flash analogue that produces scripted SVG, in compliance with open standards supported in several browsers.

In their own words: “We made an SVG-based animation framework, consisting of a GUI to specify animations and a Javascript framework to render the animation in a standards-compliant browser. Only well-accepted web standards are used and the both the tool and the resulting output are lightweight and easily accessible to enterprising hackers.”

Honorable Mention- Purple Skittles
Ian Henderson, Charles Ahn

Ian and Charles built a missile command game, where you literally defend program stacks from corruption.

We would like to thank our sponsors Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Alsop Louie Partners, and Kinfo! Also congratulations to event co-sponsors CSUA, IEEE, and UPE.

Updated at 2:30 PM Saturday

Congrats to winners!

1. The Hiro Protagonist
2. News Kaiser
3. Kaplan Killers
Honorable Mention – Ani Mani
Honorable Mention – Purple Skittles

Check out descriptions here.

Check out the justin.tv feed of the project presentations

Updated at 11:45 AM Saturday

The coding is winding down with half the groups speeding to the finish and the other half leisurely walking around the Woz. Here is the final few pictures before our Hackathon recap….

Updated at 9:15 AM Saturday

Hacking will end in less than 2 hours. Teams are starting to sign up to present here.

Population in the Woz has decreased to between 35-40.

The Soda Floors 2,3, and 7 are also home to another 17 hackers in 5 teams.

Updated at 6:30 AM Saturday

40 people left in the Woz, 8 on the 2nd floor, 2 on the 3nd floor, and 6 on the 7th floor. Surprisingly only 2 people asleep in the Woz.

Updated at 4:30 AM Saturday

The population in Woz has temporarily dropped to about 40 with 4-5 hackers taking a power nap. The 7th floor 3rd floor, and 2nd floor teams are still going at it, bringing the current count to 65 hackers. Most importantly, almost all the teams are still accounted for!

Here is a quick team status check:

1 team has dropped out
14 teams will have something to present
6 Groups MIA in Soda/Cory
2 are already done
2 are praying
2 are struggling to get Open CV to work

Updated at 2:30 AM Saturday

500 pieces of sushi came and went between 1:00AM and 1:30AM. Energized for at least a few hours, the coders are hitting it hard again.

Here is an overview of the different hacks:

Games
- Interactive Video pong
- Assasin-like game in Java
- Video game with gravity physics and accelerometer hardware
- MS Paint meets Word, a simple note-taking interface

Web Applications
- able{set}- Discover what people around you are good at
- A site for getting people in touch with beta software
- A Web 2.0 book swap website
- Craigslist apartment listing integrated into Google maps to see proximity to local POI’s
- File-sharing through image hosting sites
- Learning tool for SAT Prep
- Youtube search interface
- Changing the landscape of credit card acquisition
- Visualizing related news events

Chat Tools
- Chat log visualizer to show your social graph
- Context highlighting in a chat client
- presentation tool to encourage audience involvement

Other
- Flying mouse, mouse controlled by Webcam
- GUI to create SVG-based animations and a Javascript framework to run them
- Application framework for apps that render to both the desktop and a web interface
- Animation of tree perturbation over tree space

Updated at 12:00 AM Saturday

With 6 hours in, there are still 65-70 people going strong. Below is a pic of 50 people in the Woz. There are also 8 in the 2nd floor labs, 2 in the Mac Lab, and 10 on the 6th-7th floor.

From the look of certain hackers it appears people have entered a hyper-concentrated state…must be the combination of Redbull and doritos.

Updated at 11:00 PM Friday

We created a Justin.tv feed here

Updated at 10:00 PM Friday

We just finished sign in: as of 30 minutes ago there were 80 people on 26 teams. Most are setup in Wozniak Lounge with a few teams in the Mac Lab, CS61 Labs, and 7th floor lounges.

We have an updated schedule for the rest of the night:

1:00AM- Nude Sushi Delivery (Wozniak Lounge)
9:00AM- Breakfast bagels and muffins (Wozniak Lounge)
11:45PM- Coding STOPS
12:00PM- Presentations Begin
1:30PM- Presentations End, Judges Convene
1:45PM- Winners announced

Updated at 6:45 PM Friday

There was a quick intro by MC and hacker Dwight Crow followed by a hackathon-relevant talk by Palantir engineers Jacob Scott and Paul Twohey. Jacob and Paul fired up the crowd of 85 geeks with a history of their past successful hacks, some of which are now being used by the US Military and intelligence services.

At 6:30PM everyone fired up the engines and started 17.5 hours of coding.

Turnout was good for the first week – somewhere between 15 and 20 people came by, all in all, and among them was strong representation from a variety of Berkeley startup companies. Attendees included folks from:

Alsop Louie Partners
Morgenthaler Ventures
Wolfire Games (currently taking orders for their incredibly awesome new game, Overgrowth)
AutoTagger (automatically tags your photos, try them out on Facebook)
Kinfo (a place for families to keep in touch and share their memories)

And a couple of companies still in stealth mode *insert mysterious music*. If you’re curious as to what they’re doing, the only way to find out is to start coming…

Startup Wednesdays will be held – surprise, surprise – every week, 7pm, at La Val’s. If you’re with a startup in Berkeley, going to launch one, or are simply a diehard groupie of the startup scene, go check it out next week!

First meet-up:
Date: Wednesday, October 29 
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm 
Location: La Val’s Pizza
Street: 1834 Euclid Ave
City/Town: Berkeley, CA